This month has been a good month for me. (Of course, I know compared to others that my sales are still pathetically low. Good for me is five hundred sales in a month and there are authors out there who make that many in a day without even thinking about it.)

What’s funny is I look at this month’s sales and think. “Wow, that was really easy. You can make $100 with almost no effort.”

And you can make $100 with pretty low sales. Think about it. You can make $100 if you just sell 50 copies of a $2.99 title.

Just 50 copies.

Easy as can be. Right?

Ha!

See, when things are flowing properly and sales are actually occurring it does seem easy as can be. 50 sales? Done and done. You can knock that out in a day.

Hell, with borrows (and assuming a .005 payout) you only need 20,000 page reads to hit a hundred bucks for the day.

That seems easy enough. You hear people talk about getting 300,000 pages read in a day across their series or a million pages read on one title each month. How hard is it to get 20,000 page reads?

In reality? Having been in this whole slog for a while now? Eh…not so easy after all.

At least not for me.

Believe it or not, even hitting that 50 sales mark on a title is a struggle.

That’s right. 50 sales (without any friends and family boost to account for the first ten or twenty) is hard to pull off. And I’m not talking in one month. I’m talking ever.

(Easier with novels, of course. I’m mostly talking short stories and non-fiction here.)

Four or five sales? Yeah, sure, that’s doable. Even 20 is doable. But 50? Not so much.

I have hit it. More than once. But it’s not the norm for me. Anything over 25 and I’m pretty happy.

Wow. That feels really depressing to talk about. But it is what it is. And I think it’s good to have the counter argument to “you can make half a million dollars at this” out there.